Anti-French Racism In The USA II

JUSTICE IS WHATEVER MAKES THE EMPIRE STRONGER.

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Abstract: Adolf Hitler observed in “Mein Kampf” that people are used to little lies, which they encounter in their little lives. However, they rarely come across big lies, so they do not expect them. Thus it is easier for a propagandist to use big lies than little ones. Hitler put these observations to practice so successfully that, in the next twenty-two years, most Germans believed the enormous lies that the Nazi propaganda machine uttered, and the bigger the lies, the more they believed.

A new, systematic campaign of lies has been vigorously conducted against the French state and the French people in 2011. It was under way well before Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s arrest, to the point that I published an article protesting it, April 13, 2011, Anti-French Racism In The USA.

Now Anti-French racism has become the official line of American justice (the sick DSK had to remain in jail, because… he was French, said the DA, Vance, son of Vance, his name, and he gave two explicit reasons why, being French, he should be discriminated against; these would apply to any French citizen, so it’s indeed racism).

The latest method of anti-French propaganda consists in comparing the alleged ways of the French, and how the French justice system operate, with the ways of the Americans, and the American justice system allegedly operate.

I do such comparisons systematically, among all ethnic, religious, and historical groups, so I think such comparisons are very important, and enlightening. It is an old tradition among thinkers going back not just to Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, but all the way back to Herodotus. In a way, the Greeks at Marathon were motivated by such comparisons.

However, to do such comparisons correctly, one has to use correct facts, and it is difficult, and, often, the real facts are not as expected. The present comparisons made in the USA, or even in France (!) about France versus the USA rest, all too frequently, upon big lies presented as obvious facts. Entire articles are written, where all the facts are inverted. The French get accused by propaganda to do exactly what the Americans excel at doing more of. For example:

a) It is absolutely not true that there is more violence against women in France than in the USA. Actually it is the opposite which is blatantly true (see statistics below). The differences reported by international study groups are so huge, it is actually funny, in a sick way. Also familial statistics show French families to be more united than American ones, and reducing human relationships to “dates” does not even exist in French semantics, because the practice would look base to the French (if they understood it). Superficially, the level of anger between the genders is much lower in France. Two of the three main political parties in France are led by women. True, there is much progress to be done, and the DSK scandal is accelerating it.

b) Contrarily to what has been said, the French justice system goes systematically after French politicians, and much more vigorously than the American system ever did. Some French politicians were even executed (traitors such as Louis XVI, or Prime Minister Laval are examples).

The penultimate French Prime minister has just been condemned (Villepin, he is appealing) and a former French president is indicted (Chirac, for corruption before he became president).

In glaring contrast, the American justice system has left his politicians alone, even when they trade with the enemy, or when they help Hitler build Auschwitz (so of course Americans never heard of that, and will think you are a lunatic to say such a thing).

c) The American justice system is depicted as completely fair: another absurd lie. Fairer than justice in France? Indeed, in France, there are no bails, so, very unfairly, the rich stay locked up. Whereas in the USA Dominique Strauss Kahn (“DSK”) could post a six million dollar bail, for having touched the maid without her consent (she claims, after surprising him naked), and now he is locked up in a house. So advice to the French visiting the USA: be ready to pay millions, if you just touch, the USA economy is that bad. Maybe the USA could do as Libya under the Ottomans did, 200 years ago, and live off legalized hostage taking… Just trying to help, by making helpful suggestions.

Jokes aside, what is going on, why such American officialdom rage? Well, the guy prosecuting DSK is an American politician, whose campaign was, most probably paid by Wall Street (not just Obama gets his most important contributions from Goldman Sachs!) All of New York lives off Wall Street, which lives off the world. Wall Street brings in the big kills, worldwide, and all the scavengers, down to bacteria, profit from it.

DSK wanted to regulate Wall Street much more. As IMF director, and soon French president, he had the means to bring Wall Street to heel. Achilles had his tendon, while DSK had it tender for skirts all too much. If you want to play hero, don’t have a weakness.

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In the 1950s, the CIA had on payroll many French journalists, including the famous Raymond Cartier at Paris Match. They were supposed to tilt French opinion the right way, towards Washington. They did a great job. That secret program, part of a worldwide pro-America propaganda machinery, was revealed later under the Freedom of Information Act.

Some will excuse the whole thing, by pointing out that the CIA was then directed by Dulles, brother of Dulles, the Secretary of State who told Eisenhower what to say. Those Dulles lawyers represented not just American plutocrats such as Bush, but also more than 100 Nazi companies before the war. Dulles became the Berlin CIA chief, in charge of hunting down his former German speaking colleagues (to propose them new jobs, it turned out).

Nowadays, reading the French press is amusing, because it is still obviously the case, that some are getting paid from the USA, as they repeat the same lies found in the American press, as if their income depended upon it. It probably does.. With the exception of a courageous Ben Stein, in “Presumed Innocent, Anyone?” and a discrete implication by Paul Krugman, the American press is a monolithic block of racist rage against “presumed-innocent” DSK. The honest French have been trying to adapt to the hostility coming from New York (a city they generally liked for reasons they are soon going to find increasingly obscure).

Another day, another trash article about the French in the New York Times, darkly promoting the American empire while racially denigrating the French. Latest technique: make the French themselves tell the Americans how primitive, base, sex obsessed, criminally inclined and judicially inferior the French are:

New York Times’ propaganda: “Ms. Cottavoz, a Frenchwoman… exposed a “slippery slope” in France between what she called “chauvinist behavior” and something more aggressive, like the sexual assault of a hotel housekeeper … In New York, she has felt respected as a woman in a way she might not have been in France, where, she said, “Frenchmen get away with too many sexual advances…

We know in France that the general culture makes it comfortable for men to take liberties with women, and in America it’s not like that… In America, if they take liberties, there will be consequences.”

Philosopher answer: “Liberté,Liberté chérie” is the sixth verse of La Marseillaise… Liberties are the essence of France, as the name France indicates. “Francia”, “Frank”, etc. means free. When “taking liberties” bring “consequences” in a country, it is fascism by another name.

To reproach “liberties” to the French is a declaration of war, against what has been the organizing principle of a country, for more than 15 centuries, a country that spawned Germany, Spain and Britain, and ejected the Muslim armies out of Italy. Even the Huns broke their teeth there, and it’s doubtfull that wild west justice will stop French liberties either. Liberty has proven a much more potent weapon than fascism. Even when fascism dresses in black, and takes grand airs.

OK, let’s get into facts. The American media has proclaimed that women have it harder in France. That is rubbish.

There is much more sexual violence in the USA. The statistics are inescapable.

Rape per 100,000 in the USA: 30.2. Rape per 100,000 in France: 17.3. (Of course American chauvinists will claim that rapes get reported much less in France, a proof ot the terror French women live in! Soon we will be told that there are millions of invisible prisoners in France, all females, raped every day! The idiotic CNN reported a few months ago that there were nearly ten million invisible Muslims in France, so France would soon disappear in a Muslim sea… Meanwhile the USA is at war with DSK and BHL, who are Jews, and very Gallically so.)

Murder rate USA: 6 per 100,000. Murder rate France: 1.6 per 100,000. I leave your imagination about how many of these were sex-murders.

Serious assault per 100,000 per year, USA: 281.6 (# third rank in the world, behind South Africa and Swaziland, but ahead of Zambia; “serious assault” means more than “assault”, but short of murder). Serious assault per 100,000 per year, France: .3 (# 79th rank in the world). No wonder the Americans are expecting DSK to have assaulted seriously, leaving invisible injuries, and the French are surprised.

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Then, in the same article purporting to report facts, the New York Times rolls out a well trained academic who knows how to feed anti-French racism: French-Americans, said Thomas Bishop, director of the Center for French Civilization and Culture at New York University, do not integrate into the American mainstream as easily as other ethnic groups… Rather than dismiss Mr. Strauss-Kahn with tabloid descriptions of him as a “frisky Frenchman,”they may view his fall from power as that of a man with “a tragic flaw”…

Still, Mr. Bishop of N.Y.U. said, French-Americans are aware that in France, similar charges embroiling a powerful politician might have been “swept under the rug” by a justice system he said was more susceptible to political intrigue. The more scrupulous American justice system is something the French here grow to appreciate, he said.

Philosopher says: By using the word “might” as much as the New York Times does, it may be feasible to re-establish slavery to serve the American plutocracy. Just give us an example of French politician who walked away, Mr. Bishop… Don’t just talk, brandish facts, or then pass for the simple beggar you are, trying to ingratiate yourself to the powers that be.

I am now going to give you a few examples of big American politicians who walked away, and everybody knows it.

Powerful American politicians can swim, even under the influence, drown people, and then get away with it, thanks to the more scrupulous American justice system. After driving into the sea because he was drunk, Ted Kennedy waited until he was sober to present himself at the police station, and advise law enforcement that his latest sex toy was drowned down there inside that car. He was free to go, as he came. Hey, he was one of the grandees of America! No problemo: at Harvard, another guy took his Spanish test.

Speaking of Kennedys, the dad had made most of his fortune during the prohibition, financing the mafia. He walked away with it, becoming ambassador to Britain, where he furthered Hitler’s cause.

How many examples do we need? Nixon, as president, ordered a burglary of the headquarters of the opposition. Was he charged, arrested? No the scrupulous American justice system forgave him, in 1976. Some will say the director of the IMF does not compare to the president of the USA. Indeed, the director of the IMF is elected to represent 7 billion people, whereas Nixon represented only 250 million.

Edgar Hoover reigned over the FBI forever, in a multi decade (37 years! He died in office) crime spree strange emphasis on harassing civil rights figures, while forgetting that the mafia reigned all over, including Cuba. The FBI headquarters is named after Hoover. Equivalent figures in France do not quite exist, as they were prosecuted before becoming inamovible.

Ronald Reagan sold weapons to Iran (trading with the enemy!), financing secretly this way an illegal war in Central America. When he was asked questions, Reagan said he could not remember. He is still loved to death by the American population (literally… as it dies from reaganomics). Governor Clinton helped Reagan ferry the goods, using an airfield in Arkansas, and was condemned to serve, by the scrupulous American justice system, as American president too. Rough justice.

USA president Carter started officially the war in Afghanistan on July 3, 1979. Millions killed. Americans venerate Carter, Nobel Prize given: scrupulous justice done, once again.

Prescott Bush was one of Hitler’s closest collaborators, managing his most important defense company, working Auschwitz’s slaves. Many other American plutocrats, such as Watson (head of IBM), Ford, etc. were pillars of the Nazi regime. Top American corporations, such as Standard Oil, kept on, not just supporting Hitler’s regime, but kept on being paid throughout. None got prosecuted. Still venerated in the USA. By contrast, France nationalized Renault, judged too enthusiastic in making trucks for Hitler.

By contrast, France prosecuted its war criminals: (pre-WWII) Prime Minister Laval was executed, Marshall Petain was condemned to death (commuted to life, considering his advanced age at the time of his crimes), and so on. France executed up to 40,000 Nazi collaborators and traitors in the period 1944-1948. Papon, a very high level official, prefect of Paris in the 1960s, was condemned, when his WWII crimes finally surfaced.

In further contrast, there are many examples of contemporary French politicians who got, or are prosecuted, including ex-president Chirac. Mighty minister of the interior Pasqua got condemned to a year in jail (he is appealing). Prime ministers such as Fabius, or Villepin were, or are, prosecuted very seriously. The head of the Supreme Court, Dumas, was prosecuted, and had to resign.

Not to say that the French justice system is always superior to the American one. It is deprived of the possibility of class action lawsuits, and that’s a great disservice to the little ones, in France. Some French plutocrats, such as the well connected drug magnate Servier (successfully prosecuted in the USA and Canada) have still to see their comeuppance (the noose is squeezing, though).

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Still in the same article, here is the New York Times, in its on-going anti-French rampage: “Marie-Monique Steckel, president of the French Institute Alliance Française, which promotes French culture and language: “although some French-Americans may think Americans react too prudishly to the sex scandals of their leaders, Ms. Steckel said, “There is a difference between a womanizer and rape.”

“A womanizer is more acceptable in France,” she said. “It’s kind of considered good health and vigor, which is different from Americans, who are more puritanical. But violence against women is very different.”

Seeing conspiracy is another matter that divides Americans and French …Ms. Steckel said many French-Americans found it difficult to talk to friends in France who suspect the arrest was a plot by Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s political opponents.

Mr. Strauss-Kahn was widely expected to be the Socialist candidate for president. French people who have lived in New York for a long time, she said, have moved beyond seeing the world in such a conspiratorial fashion. “The French adore the idea of plots,” she said. “They see plots everywhere. French-Americans become morefactual.” ”

Philosopher: Americans, those God lovers, with America-under-God, are now factual? A god in every pot? Verily, people in New York have never seen a conspiracy in action: on 9/11, they were looking somewhere else, busy being factual. Plane goes into tower; boom. A fact, not a conspiracy. Another plane goes into another tower: boom. Another fact, not a conspiracy.

How many boom booms does one need to resonate in the American mind? But of course, I forgot, Americans do not know that they own government conspired to attack Afghanistan in 1979, using bin Laden. Since there are no conspiracy, nor plots, just facts.

In truth, history is pretty much made exclusively of conspiracies. So all this obsessive belief that there are no conspiracies, only God, says, is this: Americans have never heard of history. Let alone read it. A country can only go that far this way, because it means it learned nothing. All knowledge is historical, even in science.

The Afghan war was started by the USA, secretly. And bin Laden was recruited, secretly. That was the result of a secret plot of the CIA and Prince Turki (head of Saudi intelligence). And bin Laden made a plot, secretly. And the French and the Israeli pretty much warned the USA about it, secretly.

And then the Pakistani ISI harbored bin Laden in its most fortified town, secretly, for 6 years, until it secretly sold it to Obama who, all too loudly, said it was not so. Oh, yeah, what about the secret paper with Stalin about secretly dividing Europe? That was not a plot?

Americans are conditioned to believe there no conspiracies, no classes, and no plots. Thus the cattle goes to the slaughterhouse, with equanimity, head high, as behooves the stupid. Then Americans can’t explain Auschwitz, the Civil War, disappearance of the Indians, or slavery. And they don’t care. It does not matter, because they have reached the most important conclusion that way: there is no plutocracy, but plutocracy and mental apathy is its prophet. Plutocracy provides, it’s most merciful: look at all the tall towers in New York. Strauss-Kahn wanted to take all that easy money away, and actually make New York work for a living. No wonder New Yorkers hate Strauss-Kahn.

OK, now for a humoristic break to show how clueless the New York elite can be. The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd, interviewed the future (French!) female successor of Strauss-Kahn at the IMF, Christine Lagarde (note): “The French are reconsidering the line between seduction and aggression. I asked Lagarde how she would delineate it. “You know when you receive a big slap in the face,” Lagarde says, “or when someone says ‘No.’ ”

Has she ever felt sexually harassed? “No, I’m too tall. I’ve been in sports for too long,” she says, smiling and flexing the muscle under her black Ann Taylor jacket.

“They know that I could just punch them.” “

As Dowd, who had insulted Strauss-Kahn in previous essays, revealed earlier in her article, Lagarde is 5-10. Dowd does not understand at all what Lagarde is telling her. That the funniest part; Dowd faithfully related Lagarde making fun of her, and Dowd is so dumb, so blinded by her preconceptions, she had no notion of it. So she related faithfully Lagarde’s contempt for her, with no notion of it.

Lagarde is telling Dowd, that Dowd is a complete idiot. Lagarde, a conservative, says: of course Strauss-Kahn could not sexually assault me, because I would punch him out. And guess what? Lagarde knows that Strauss-Kahn supposed victim towers above her, Lagarde!

Everybody knows in France that the presumed victim in the alleged rape attempt is more than 6 feet tall, and that her strength is legendary (from her job). She probably could strangle Strauss-Kahn with just one hand. The only thing that prevents her to do that, in the exalted American legal opinion, is the even more legendary virile prowess of the Frenchman, that domineering beast, who can probably rape, just by looking at a woman. And it’s well known the French do plenty of that, even to exaggeratedly tall illegal Guinean immigrants.

Strauss Kahn is short, fat, old, sick (he was hooked up by American prison authorities to an oxygen machine, just so that he would keep on breathing through the night in jail). One has to be idiotic, or very well paid, like a New York tabloid artists, or a New York talking head, to not understand any of this.

All New York tabloids are owned by legendary plutocrats, singing the glory of plutocracy, protected by bodyguards and killer maids. Even Jon Steward knows who his masters are, and he flexed his pathetic racist muscle against philosopher Henri Bernard Levy (if I were an American Jew, I would not attack French Jews, because American Jews did nothing effective to prevent the Holocaust, when they could, and should have; so millions of Jews were stuck in Europe, when the war started, and died at Hitler’s hands, in partial consequence of American Jewry unwitting, and dim witted, collaboration).

When Murderoch, a plutocrat who inherited his fortune in Australia, and expanded it propagandizing for neoconservative Thatcher, became American, to become even bigger. He bought many tabloids. Some are in New York, now screaming against Strauss-Kahn, working on the jurors’ minds (that’s called the justice screaming system).

Murderoch bought the Fox channel, crazy like a fox, indeed. Then Murderoch told the little Americans to go attack Iraq for him, and they did, like enraged lemmings, crossing the sea, foaming at the mouth, and hating France which was in the way. Plutocrats have hated France since 1789, and counting. French plutocrats have adopted a low profile.

Strauss-Kahn’s pretended victim, in the prime of her life, nearly as tall and massive as the Terminator himself, is 30 years younger. Oh, and how did that creature get to the USA? Did she swim, like Ted Kennedy? She has no American relative. Her Muslim fundamentalist family is in the business of making money from Islam, and is relatively wealthy (they own the biggest house, painted all over, up there in the wet Fouta Djallon mountain range). The victim to kill all victims has at least 11 close family members in that Guinean village. No, of course, this whole thing has nothing to do with the fact that she discovered that Strauss-Kahn is a Jew. Nothing to get hysterical about, a bit of cavorting for the Muslim fundamentalist, with the naked Jew she surprised in his rooms.

Some are going to scream that I lack sympathy for the potential victim. No, I do have sympathy for victims. I have been one myself, several times, for reasons related to my opinions. But I also know that the law can be used to aggress. I have seen several cases, in several countries, close and personal. Moreover, I have been myself the object of more serious aggressions, than this ridiculous he said-she said-that-he-touched-me-there.

When I was aggressed, blood flowed, and lots of it. Vertebrae broke. Limbs were torn, fingers were on the ground, like little sausages (although the target, when I was bombed, somebody else got the brunt of it). That’s serious crime. And the perpetrators got away… precisely because of political considerations! Instead, some of the victims got prosecuted… So I get very suspicious when I see big politics involved, and official rage being turned on from up high. And especially when racism is involved (the racists who threw a bomb on me were not seriously prosecuted, and yes, it did not happen in the USA.)

I also get suspicious when a full grown gigantic woman scream attempted rape. If an elephant is scared of a mouse, that’s not the fault of the mouse. And she can give a good slap instead, as Christine Lagarde said. That’s the feminist way. Feminism is not about protecting fake helpless women from imaginary abuse. That is persevering with the old system, where women are so impotent, that they are terrified of even old, sick, short, overweight men.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn was a corporate lawyer, agrege’, and tenured university professor of economics, before he became France’s finance minister. His rich culture is of mixed Alsatian Jew and Tunisian Sephardic Jew. He is this rare bird, a very competent economist. His actions at the IMF re-introduced Drawing Rights, on a huge scale (roll over, American dollar!) He pulled the world out of a serious crisis when heading the IMF. But not in a way which could please American plutocracy.

In this demented world, nearly half of the profits of large companies in the USA originate in the financial sector. Strauss-Kahn had proclaimed, loud and clear, that what was needed was more government, worldwide, and more regulations. In other words, he wanted to violate New York, den of financial piracy, rob it of its major source of wealth.

I will inspect the justice system of the USA soon, with an arsenal of scathing facts. The USA has a more cruel justice system in 2011 than France had in 1815, coming out of Napoleon’s dictatorship. Time to demonstrate it, as American justice claims to be exerted through summary executions, all the way to Pakistan.

I will ponder why the New York DA, a politician most probably paid by Goldman Sachs and the like, proclaimed two reasons for American law to discriminate against French citizens. And why American judges agreed. And whether this is related in some sense to this little American Indian boy, who, 160 years ago, shot a toy arrow through a Texan judge’s heart.

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Patrice Ayme

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Note: Christine Lagarde’s only difficulty with getting the IMF job is that French justice has her eye on her, about going too easy on a rich guy, Bernard Tapie (who claimed to be owed money by the state). Just a question of 285 million euros (she sent the case to arbitration, instead of leaving it in court her opponents say). Whereas American plutocrats count their gifts from Washington in billions, if not dozens of billions, and never been even suspected. Talk about the French justice being easy on French politicians…

16 Responses to “Anti-French Racism In The USA II”

With all due respect, Patrice, what you are reporting is the skirmish going on at the surface.

The fact and the matter is that France has been so different from the Anglo-Saxon orthodoxy, with few exceptions such as Sarkozy’s, that our plutocrats find it difficult to admit publicly where their summer homes and preferred vacation destinations are.

Had it not been for the French genius and willingness to pay, we’d have had less real variety in the world. And, especially to my compatriots, I say,

Dear Multumnonmulta: I agree I am reporting the skimirshes. But that was a quickie. I was trying to compensate for BHL’s well meaning, but weak counter-attack. The French press and inteligentsia have been taken by surprise, and so far, have been completely mystified by what has happened. I was infuriated by the several strident articles a day telling the same old tired lies. If nobody replies, they become the truth!

As I hinted, I am writing a mightier essay about the American sense of justice (prompted in part by my friend Obama’s naivety). But because it’s deeper, it’s harder to write.
PA

Patrice, I always read your comments with interest and will admit that you make a lot of important points in this piece, especially about violence.

Having lived in my adult life in Paris and Philadelphia, I know I certainly feel less likely to be shot in Paris.

But I’d like to share two anecdotes with you.

The first is when I was living on Rue de la Roquette and had what I would characterize as a stalker. This man would show up and try to talk to me several times a week in the neighborhood, even though I made it very clear I was not interested. I spoke to a police officer also in the neighborhood (maybe I should have filed a report instead) who said I should be flattered by the attention. Luckily, I was on good terms with most of the merchants in my neighborhood and one day when this man was being particularly insistent and my hands were full of groceries, the butcher on the corner came out with his cleaver and threatened the stalker.

The other incident was on the number 4 metro, going home to my apartment near Denfert Rochereau, after having stayed at a friend’s apartment in the 9th past when the metro stopped running. Since it was early, there were not many people in the car and I found myself surrounded by several young men, who were being very insistent, even though I avoided engaging with them. Since I felt unsafe, I got up to get out and walk the rest of the way. When I stood up, one of the men put his arm around me and stuck his hand inside my jeans.

Dear Didite:
Thanks for the appreciation, and the informative input. I always appreciate.

Now for the substance of what you said. Well, agreed. I lived myself more extensively in the USA than in France, and, well, let’s say that I even got more proposals from French, French living in the USA, than from Americans, overall! Both attitudes can step over the line, in my opinion. Passion and the animal spirits going out is a good thing, especially to avoid them getting nutty if they are kept too much in the closet.

My own personal, philosophical line is that there is a real very thin line between SEXISM and SEXUALISM. From the descriptions I read, there is no doubt that DSK was in need of serious philosophical re-education that way. Sexism should be unlawful in all its aspects, and sexualism viewed as very bad manners. Instead there is no doubt that, especially on the left, it is all too systematically viewed as “bourgeois” to be sexually reserved.

Ah, what would be the difference between sexism and sexualism? Well the former should be outlawed, and the avoidance of the later the only way to have a gender blind civilization.

In general French law enforcement is more into shades of gray. I was once extracted money by a garagiste in the Alps, using a threatening manner. I went to complain to the Gendarmerie, which then saw the guy, and got the money back. But I also got a reprimand, a scolding by American standards, for having left out what they viewed as important details (they were so unimportant, i don’t remember them). The whole thing would certainly not have happened in the USA: I got the money back, the garagiste and his son got a serious earful from the gendarmes, and the victim, namely me, also got a serious wag of the finger!

The garagiste, who was in the habit of doing what he did to me, quit his behavior, and I have mountain climbed with gendarmes more than once (other gendarmes)….

Police in France used to be called “officiers de la paix”. Typically, they work the neighbourhoods, and even have contacts with more or less organized crime. Before you go in front of a judge, you have got to have done much more in France, and, by law, it’s handled very discreetly. The traditional scene of the American arrest, which criminalizes the presumed innocent, is completely illegal. That French (and British) approach is now European law: there were nearly no pictures of Mladic, and the few there were, obtained through powerful zooms…

The serious assault rate in the USA is 1,000 times that in France. There is little doubt that it is the other way around for just irritating, aggressive interactions. I think that milder aggression, such as unwanted touching, will go down as surveillance cameras multiply (they are far from British densities for now).

I long lived in Senegal, and people there tended to be aggressive in all sorts of way, superficially, including the women. But the rate of really serious aggression was tiny. They preferred to have an enemy to argue with than to kill the enemy. That is why I am highly skeptical of the charges of N. Diallo against DSK. A normal towering West African beauty would have punched the daylights out of him, if what she supposedly said what happened, really did happen. Culturally, it makes no sense (all the physical fights I had were in Senegal, OK, I was a child. Still… Females there are much more physically and sexually aggressive than in Europe or the USA).
PA

Patrice, I think you have forgotten one important freedom: the freedom to criticize other nations and cultures. I read the French, German and Spanish press every day, and none of them are bashful in their critiques of America and its ways. Yet rarely do the German and Spanish media completely savage the US and its people quite the way their French counterparts in Le Monde, Libé or France 2 do. Sometimes the Germans and Spanish are even positive in their reporting. (Example: Der Spiegel and El País discuss good universities in the American Deep South, while the French media never report on “le Sud profond” at all except to remind readers about the Ku Klux Klan or the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.) Many of us who have lived in France could point to a very French strain of “cultural racism”, too. In fact, I would describe it as rather virulent.

Mason: Basful = Shy, self-conscious, and awkward in the presence of others… Let me remind you in passing that Germany and Spain were long under fascist regimes, accomplices to the powers that be in the USA. Spain was pulled out by the EU, and Germany, forcefully. That they be grateful to the USA is understandable. I personally have a longer memory, and remember that there was two ways to stop Hitler in 1940: France got lucky, or the USA would bark at Hitler. Instead the biggest American plutocrats collaborated with Hitler, and, later, against American GIs (a lot of Nazi military equipment was from American tech transfer or from American owned companies!).

On the entire DSK affair, the most virulent, by far, has been your not so humble correspondent. And I do not view myself as anti-American. I am just fair and balanced. Very fair, and very balanced. So far, as much as I can see, the French press has been mild and contrite. They even point at the wrong direction in the DSK conspiracy, whereas it’s perfectly obvious to me Wall Street is behind it. There is one anti DSK article on the front page of the (electronic) editon of the NYT, every day… it’s not like there are no more important news than a guy grabbing a crotch (it has happened to me in judo, more than once, I kept on fighting… And was not found crying in a corner…).

In any case, if a French judge explained that Americans have to be discriminated against because of something an American did in the past, I would call him/her a racist monkey in robes.

In WWII, some French judges collaborated with the Nazis (OK, they may have had no choice). Especially in executing hostages. That was fascist. Fascism is fascism, and racism is racism.

In conclusion, I do not agree with your depiction of bias in the French press about the USA. On the other hand, as the DSK affair unfolds, especially if my fears get confirmed, expect furious reservations about American justice. I am myself preparing a scathing article: USA IN JUSTICE. I hope you get the joke…

Plutocracy is ruining the USA, and the coackroaches in power, those financial rats, have nothing in common with the sailors and fliers at Midway. Just like average French had nothing to do with the up to 40,000 who got executed in 1944-48… Let’s move on beyonf “Anti-Americanism”: it’s a ridiculous concept. We don’t want to sink to the base level of Anti-French judges.

And I wellcome your pointed observations about what I say which would show bias, in your opinion…
PA

Your passionate stand re DSK and a likely setup courtesy WallStreet point of view have some merits worth noticing.

Yet, will you allow me to be rather sceptikal as pertains to the way the French judiciary system deals with politicians?

Louis XVI and Laval cases can hardly be taken as evidence that “the French” are not shy to send their politicians to justice. Both cases happened during a Revolution over 200 years ago and after four years of foreign occupation 70 years ago. They’re hardly representative of how the French courts work on a daily basis.

As you know Papon was convicted over 40 years after the war and didn’t entirely serve his sentence.

Pasqua will always get away and afaik he has been definitively cleared of any wrong doing.

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“France executed up to 40,000 Nazi collaborators and traitors in the period 1944-1948.”

I’m afraid that figure -that I’ve never read or heard of before- is much much exagerated. According to Wikipedia (Épuration légale in the English Wiki) 791 executions were legaly carried out. Notwithstanding several hundreds who were executed on the spot by the Resistance or the mob of course.

Hi Flocon: Somehow yor comment got put aside by the commentariat system, so please excuse the delay… Moreover, its’ the second time I try to answer you, I lost the first long comment, because of a computer crash, and I don’t really have the time.

Wikipedia is very useful, and can be very biased. Some people are just vicious, others, desperately ill informed.

In the vicious category, I modified ten times at least the entry on the history of energy, re-instating each time Emilie du Chatelet’s glorious contribution. Something sexist pigs did not like. How could a woman, among all the creatures, be so important for the history of physics?
Something similar happened with Buridan: how could the Christian church be so bad, and erase major scientific advances made in 1320 CE?

Wikipedia is ill informed about the executions in France. The 40,000 number was advanced by knowledgeable people. 20,000 executions, half from the resistance, half from official but quick justice, is generally accepted.

My grandfather was a major resistance figure (and a “just”). However he saved a 16 year old kid who had enrolled in the Charlemagne SS division, and was going to be executed. That was enough to bring a legal, but quick, execution in 1944, in South-East France, after thousands of resistance fighters had been deported, with their families, thousands tortured, thousands assassinated.

Without the fabulous fight of the French resistance against the Nazis in Spring 1944, D Day would have certainly be transformed in the world’s largest swimming event. The fact that this is probably not in Wikipedia is revealing of the intensity of plutocratic propaganda, and it’s an atrocity. A theoretical atrocity, but an atrocity nevertheless..
PA

Educated people should just ignore this nonsense and not follow this line of thinking when it is just simply relatively harmless commercially motivated “banter”.

This should only become an issue when this technique is systematically used as a means to detract attention from howegrown problems (and)or to incite racism. However i feel this is not the case with regards to the NY Times and Mr. Dowds recent silly article in particular (I believe you commented there).

Hey Jo!
Well, the New York Times has been running one sex-anti-French article a day for weeks now (there was a slightly rabid editorial by Roger Cohen which followed Dowd, there was the next day one DSK and Tristane Banon, etc… Cohen did not publish my counter-comment, by the way). So we are running in an emotional climate, and one thing I have collected from my deep study of Nazism, is that one should fire with fire. OK, better, higher, more educated fire.

The assumption by black robed American judges of official anti-French racism is a very grave event.

OK, France can defend herself against the USA, and official hostility is philosophically better than the underground sort. But, clearly, the basic principle of racism, discrimination on the ground of ethnic origin, has become condoned by American justice. OK, there again, nothing really new in the USA.

However American racism inspired the Nazis. The Nazis reasoned that official racism was the secret, succesful dark heart of the USA, and they were right on that (I will detail in a future essay: the French and Spanish had been in contact for 250 years with the same Indians that the white Americans wiped out in a generation). Then the Nazis tried to duplicate that “success” story in Europe, having persuaded themselves they dealt with neolithics.

The danger now is that the USA start treating the rest of the planet like the neolithics they are not. It leads to the reign of plutocracy, increasing fascism, technological stagnation, deteriorating economics.

For French connected people in the USA, life has become harder, once again. People actually believe (some of) the propaganda, and like the judges in New York, apply it to all French. It has had a dramatic effect on my social scene, at least… meanwhile the district attorney in New York is putting huge PUBLIC ressources in the case of that breast which should not have been touched (a slight modification of Moliere, nearly 4 centuries later!) In the San Francisco Bay Area, several people get shot to death, every day.

So it is an emotional issue, and should be treated as such. Hannah Arendt pointed out that the Jews collaborated with Hitler (at a time when they should have fought him tooth and nail). That made her distinctly unpopular with American Jews, but it was true. And it was an important point. It’s a basic maneuver of oppression to make the victims collaborate in their own victimization. Not so with me: I would basically put a travel warning for the French wanting to visit the USA, reminding them of what the judges said. BTW, a few years back, 2 German brothers were executed in Texas, and never saw their Consul, a violation of international law.

Deep down, if France becomes officially hostile to enchroaching American fascism and plutocracy, it will actually help the USA, just as France helped Germany with Hitler (and more generally, with old fashion German racial fascism which Nietzsche condemned stridently). I strongly suspect that the basic problem of DSK was his call to government, regulation, drawing rights, and, generally, using European power. DSK had forgotten he was supposed to be a Wall Street valet. That was intolerable to the power wonks in Washington and New York. The concept of con-spiracy helps to understand the rest.

Anyway, thanks for your input, and giving me the chance of explaining myself in more detail!
PA

“Americans are conditioned to believe there no conspiracies, no classes, and no plots.”

Surely this is stated in jest; just look at the intense interest in all manner of conspiracies in the US: JFK, UFOs, 9/11, Pearl Harbor, Waco, The 2003 Iraq War, Afghanistan, The Valerie Plame Affair, The Oklahoma City Bombing, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima of Nagasaki. The list goes on and on…

“Thus the cattle goes to the slaughterhouse, with equanimity, head high, as behooves the stupid. Then Americans can’t explain Auschwitz, ”

Here’s an American explaining Auschwitz:

France and the UK conspired to destroy the German Empire at Versailles and succeeded. WIth her borders in tatters, her military forcibly decommissioned, her colonies seized and her most valuable industrial heartland occupied by the French and British, Germany was subjected to a massive influx of so-called “Ostjuden” (eastern European Jews who fled the collapse of the Russian Empire).

The Ostjuden adhered to a puritanical sect of Judaism and were the creators and biggest supporters of Zionism. The Ostjuden leveraged their new found freedoms (enjoyed by all German jews) and rapidly came to dominate German industry and media and were the strongest supporters of German communism.

The Ostjuden were also the power elite of the Soviet Union. Jews were in the vanguard of Soviet style revolutions in Bavaria, Poland and Hungary where they unleashed a Red Terror. These revolutions were terrible and short lived but the threat of the Soviet Union (it had invaded Poland in the 1920s) and the perceived Ostjuden “fifth column” terrified the German middle class, particularly the industrialists as well as the military aristocracy.

The Nazis exploited this understandable fear to come to power as the party of Law and Order which they restored and a party dedicated to overcoming external and internal threats to German independence and national survival i.e. the Soviet Union, the French + British and the Ostjuden.

Hitler went about trying to peacefully overturn the unfair terms of the Versailles Treaty but was rebuffed by a hostile France and an indifferent Britain. The threat of the Soviet Union probably played into the appeasement of the West where anti-Jewish attitudes were also quite pronounced.

With the coming of war, the Nazis felt the need to liquidate the perceived “fifth column” Ostjuden (their wealthier native co-religionists had mostly fled before then) particularly as war with the Soviet Union, “The Ostjuden Entity”, became a harsh reality. The subjugation and oppression (though probably not the extermination) of the Ostjuden was done with the support of the vast majority of Germans who all stood to gain from their economic competitors’ downfall. The rest is tragic history.

The role the US played in Auschwitz is confined to the support given by IBM and a few other US companies (acting through European subsidiaries like Opel) to minor bookkeeping and logistical support they provided the German government under pre-war contracts which were not repudiated by either side. The Germans abused these contracts to commit genocide.

I’ll happily explain ” the Civil War, disappearance of the Indians, or slavery” i n a future post; I’ll let you digest this one first.

Dear Marauder: A lot on the plate you present here, thanks for the effort! If I wanted to answer you point by point, it would take ten pages. Some of what you say seems dangerously close to an apology of Nazism.
For example, you claim that Hitler wanted to change the unfair parts of the Versailles Treaty. What would those be? The existence of Poland? How unfair is that? At Munich France and Britain gave Hitler the Sudeten. Then Hitler took all of Czechoslovakia.
In retrospect, it seems that France would have been better served by seizing the entire left bank of the Rhine. Surely, France should have declared war about Hitler’s occupation of that in 1936. But then, of course the French would have been accused of war mongering.
It is not true that Britain was indifferent. It was pro-Nazi in 1935, and signed a Treaty with Hitler violating the Versailles Treaty.
The true lesson of Versailes is that Germany should have been occupied, and philosophically cleansed. Far from being a terrible anti-German thing, Versaileles was too kind with German fascism, which had already caused WWI. These mistakes were rectified after 1941, when the aim of the war became the destruction of old fashion Germany. I am happy to report (near) total success.

You minimize the collaboration of American plutocracy with Nazism. I go even further; Hitler was financed massively by the Jew hater Henry Ford, as early as 1921. the flood of American money and weapons allowed the Nazis to organize the 1923 putsch, and the extermination war against their opponents in 1932.

Hitler massacred all Jews, not just the Ostjuden. True, he got the support of Western Jews initially, but that’s another story. Another point: Germany did not have so many colonies. After its monstruous attack onto the world of August 1914, the German regime, and the facist society behind it, ought to have been annihilated. Once again, that grave mistake was corrected in 1945. I regret, however, the complete destruction of East Prussia. Hopefully the USSR (aka Russia) can be kicked out of so called “Kaliningrad” some day.

Thanks for your challenging comment! And don’t hesitate to reply. BTW, the fact serious Americans look down “conspiracy theories”, and they tend to call any serious history that way, stands. The Prussian attack on the world in 1914 was a conspiracy of 6 generals and admirals (including a distant relative of mine!)
PA

Great I’m writing to you in the night were DSK is almost found not guilty, I’m French and Love the U.S.A, but if Straus khan is found free of charges; he will be like the” cont of monte christo” bonne chance to the relation between France and the U.S.A……………

Indeed, there is a disgusting anti-French racism in the USA, an expression of the pain and jealousy Americans feel at the decomposition of their democracy. It also is central to plutocratic propaganda to present the sister republic as a failure, lest the Americans would imitate the French and go out in the street to denounce the rascals. (Michael Moore noticed this explicitly in “Sicko”).

The judicial and police system in New York is in conspiracy with, when not outright paid by, Wall Street.
So what next? The French visiting the USA better not be naive, as DSK was when he left his seat (he had diplomatic immunity as he was on an official IMF mission, with ticket even bought by IMF weeks before).

The continual cave-ins of the American left (now to the right of Nixon, or even Reagan!) to the hyper right wing extremists paid by the plutocracy makes the whole thing as slow motion fascization… The USA has, overall, treated France pretty badly since… 1934. In 1939, the USA was helping Hitler, in 1944, it had planned to occupy France (!). The French army prevented that. Relief was found by wrecking French infrastructure, and all ports, by carpet bombing. Anyway, time to wake up!
PA